Making A Super Action

Do you find yourself using the same few actions all the time? Are you constantly tweaking your actions by changing the opacity and fiddling with layers? Then this quick video tutorial is for you!

A Super Action is what I like to call an action that runs other actions. It’s great for encapsulating a whole recipe of different actions into a single place. It saves you time, helps keep things consistent, and best of all, can be batch processed on hundreds or even thousands of images. It’s easy to do, and it just takes a minute.

And if you aren’t the video type, here are step-by-step instructions on how to do it:

Make sure the actions palette isn’t in button mode, and then click the folder icon in the actions palette to create an action set for your new action (unless you already have one that you want to put the action in, in which case just select that folder in the actions palette).

Click the New Action button, which looks like a little piece of paper at the bottom of the actions palette. Give it a snazzy name, and hit Record.

Do some stuff. Run the actions that you’d normally run, and fiddle with opacity and layers as you normally would. The opacity and layer changes will be dutifully recorded into your Super Action.

Click the Stop button at the bottom of the actions palette (the black square).

Now every time you run your Super Action, you’ll get your entire recipe reproduced, along with any changes to layer opacity and visibility. If you’re looking for ideas on what to do with your first Super Action, check our our Totally Rad Recipes for inspiration and recipe ideas!